The Egalitarian Sublime: A Process Philosophy

209 Pages·2019·1.492 MB·English

by  James Williams

THE
EGALITARIAN
SUBLIME
A PROCESS PHILOSOPHY
J A M E S W I L L I A M S
The Egalitarian Sublime
A Process Philosophy
JAMES WILLIAMS
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Contents
Acknowledgements v
1 Introduction 1
2 Microcritique and the Sublime 8
Between historical objectivity and radical innovation 8
Microhistory 15
Method and the problem of exclusion 26
Patterns of fragments 32
3 Nietzsche Against the Egalitarian Sublime 36
Only for the few 36
The sublime as effect 40
Untimely, sublime 46
Sublime individuals against cohesive communities 52
Through the few, but for the many? 62
Individuals and masses 73
4 The Return to the Sublime 76
The search for value 76
Nostalgic social sublime 85
Diagrams of the technological sublime 90
The environmental sublime 98
5 Sublime Miseries 108
From high to low 108
Kant: equality in universality 115
Schopenhauer’s sublime consolations 121
Žižek: a depressing lesson about horror and suffering 133
The abject and egalitarian sublime 149
6 Defining the Egalitarian Sublime 155
The sublime and egalitarian politics 155
Unequal by definition 161
Not after the sublime 173
7 Conclusion: The Sublime as Crisis 177
Notes 181
Bibliography 191
Index 197
Acknowledgements
This research began with a conference on the sublime and music, run by
Eddie Campbell at the University of Aberdeen in 2015. I am grateful to him
for his encouragement and helpful suggestions. Over the next few years, I
benefited from conversations with many friends and colleagues. I will single
out Brian Smith, Tina Röck, Keith Ansell Pearson and Michael Wheeler,
for an intellectual generosity that took me far beyond the areas I was most
familiar with. Deakin University has provided me with an academic home,
and my investigation into the sublime has been supported by colleagues at
Deakin, Jack Reynolds, Sean Bowden and Jon Roffe, and their fellow
Melburnians Maria Nichterlein and John Morss. The research continued
with a series of seminars at Cologne University, in the summer term of 2016.
Many of the ideas developed here can be traced back to debates with students
and colleagues in Cologne. The book is dedicated to them as unwitting,
perhaps unwilling, co-authors. The idea of the author persists and perhaps
grows stronger in this age of name-driven and lightning-quick, if ephemeral,
digital celebrity. One of the main ideas of my essay lies in the deception
intrinsic to any definition of the sublime. The sublime obscures its own
construction and the imposition of values it leads to. There is a similar
deception in the author’s name. It hides essential contributions by editors
and copy-editors – my thanks go to Carol Macdonald and Tim Clark for
their expertise and patience. The name also conceals a deep debt to the
precious support system offered by libraries. Without the National Library
of Scotland and its dedicated staff, this book could not have been written.
The heart of my support systems is also the source of my deepest thoughts
and feelings: Claire, Rebecca, Nathan and Al.

Chapter 1
Introduction
We call sublime all that is supposed to be the very best. What if the best is the
worst? What if the best leads to inequality and exploitation? This book criti-
cises the sublime, in its long history and recent turn back to sublime art and
emotions. Demonstrating that the sublime has always led to inequality, through
critical interpretations of Burke, Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Žižek, and
repudiations of recent environmental and technological sublimes, the book argues
for an anarchist sublime: multiple, self-destructive and temporary, opposed to any
idea of a highest value to be shared by all, but imposed on the powerless.
The sublime has always been a sign for the highest values, yet definitions of
the sublime have also had social, cultural and political effects resulting in
harsh and persistent inequalities. This is because, in historical cases, the way
sublimity leads to superior values also implies a wide variety of distinctions
around them. These distinctions entrench inequality in arriving at the high-
est. So a manner of searching for the most elevated values turns out to arrive
at some of the worst political consequences.
Historically, and in recent thought, there is always the hope that superior
values associated with the sublime will be long lasting. This is a dangerous
wish, when the values and ways to them turn out to be divisive and damaging.
Yet there have been no instances of the sublime free of this damage. Even
when the aim is to share the highest values universally, the definitions of
universal and of the sublime still retain their unequal effects. Even when
guided by the purest of intentions, the process going from the production of
the sublime by a few, to its imposition on the many, makes the aim of univer-
sal access to the best impossible.
In response, I will claim that if there is to be an egalitarian sublime, it
will have to be anarchic: multiple, creative, self-critical and self-destructive.
2 | the egalitarian sublime
It will have to work against systems giving rise to inequality, including those
versions of the sublime implicated in unequal values. The sublime should also
be subservient to a politics of equality, rather than a foundation for them.
This is a sceptical version of the sublime. Since the sublime and values have
always turned out badly, we should only follow the sublime and adopt values
warily, looking to the decay and violence in them, and discarding them for
others as they fail us. The sublime is only truly equal when it knows itself to
be unequal.
For this sceptical sublime, value emerges in many different ways. This
multiplicity is also a value: not one sublime but many. Does this mean the
sublime is about individuals with different values competing with one
another? This question misses the ideas of collective emergence and creation
in the sublime. It also misses the point that value only makes sense when
shared in some way. Though inequality and how to avoid it are deep
challenges for any definition of the sublime, they are concerns because the
highest values emerge and matter communally, across multiple, inter connected
and shifting groups. Only thereafter do they serve to divide communities and
individuals.
Why describe the sublime as production and creation? Historically, it has
more often been defined as a kind of receptivity and passivity. The sublime
happens to us. When it happens, the highest values are expressed and received,
their certainty underwritten by the power of emotion. This line of thought
misses three roles for production and creativity. First, if the sublime is simply
received during the communication of value, why has it been necessary for
writers to define and redefine it, in order to promote it? As an idea, the
sublime has always been invented as well as experienced. Second, while
the sublime is supposed to strike at passivity, it is also taken to be something
we need to be readied for, in order to experience it. As such, it only stands out
for active and educated forms of attention. Third, taken not from the side of
the reception but from that of the sending, the sublime message or event
emerges over time; it is crafted, or occurs in settings that have been shaped
or manufactured. Even at its most natural, it is preserved, or reinstated, or
designed. The sublime object is constructed over time.
This essay is therefore about how the sublime is made as unequal. It will
be claimed that the sublime is fabricated when it is defined, as it has been
from its very beginnings in classical rhetoric, right up to its modern and post-
modern definitions. It will also be claimed that it is partly made when it is
experienced. How it comes to hit us is prepared for and followed in creative
ways. Finally, the sublime is made whenever the world is imagined differently
and changed.
There is a feedback loop from definitions of the sublime, to ideas and
values about how the world should be transformed and experienced, to
introduction | 3
unequal outcomes for those who inhabit that world – whether they be
humans, other animals, plants or objects – and finally back to new attempts
to get the sublime right. Value begets value, but not necessarily the value it
wants, or pretends to want.
References to history are repeated here because work on the sublime is
necessarily historical. It doesn’t matter how much you believe you have
defined a new sublime, your novelty is but a figure in a very long historical
series. It is a daunting line to belong to, haunted by some of the most influ-
ential thinkers, where they often come closest to wretched and shameful
conclusions, ending in racism, sexism, division between animals, belief in
superiors among equals, and world-ending despair.
Even the most knowing recent moments in this history touch this base-
ness, when they reject the sublime, but leave the place of value vacant and
ready for charlatans, cynics and nihilists. That’s why this essay has a subplot
tending towards the multiple, pessimistic, critical and self-destructive
sublime, rather than concluding with its mere dismissal. We can’t have done
with value without inviting a return to discredited ideals that all wisdom
should fear. This is one of the reasons the sublime is persistent. New thinkers
keep returning to it, because getting our highest values wrong has such
terrible consequences.
Behind the problem of the sublime, there is hence also a problem of
history. What is the right way of telling, or collating, or recreating the history
of an old and yet tenacious concept like the sublime? The essay begins with a
chapter on historiography and method. In following ideas of microhistory,
a relatively recent historical practice, it develops an approach called microcri-
tique. This method alternates between close-up views of precise historical
evidence, taken from many influential texts on the sublime, and wide spans
of more speculative and suggestive vision, where the two perspectives inform,
correct and transform each other, allowing no reduction to a single picture.
This is risky work, as shown by the contradictions latent in ideas of trans-
formation of evidence, or in the redundancy implied by the correction of a
vision. If evidence is fact or truth, why would we need speculation at all? The
study of the methods of microhistory is designed to address this question, but
that’s not enough, because even if it can be answered satisfactorily, another
more difficult problem remains. What is the right form of speculation? Is it
story-making, the weaving of a narrative thread through history? Or is it a
more scientific type of hypothesis, to be verified by the evidence, or a moral
and legal judgement of history? Or perhaps it is a creative and artistic pres-
entation, or maybe a debate within the confines of a carefully defined subject,
with scholarly rules of engagement and representation?
The answer suggested here combines the analysis of definitions on the
basis of historical interpretation, with the division and organisation of those